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I burned my grandson's hand on a Saturday morning in February and I have not told anyone the truth about how it happened until right now. Theo is 6. He was staying with me for the weekend because my son Kyle and his wife Jess were doing a 25th anniversary trip to Galena, which they'd been planning for 8 months. They asked me in October. I said yes the way you say yes when you'd cut off your own arm to be asked. My only grandchild. Two whole nights. Just me and him. I planned the weekend like a wedding. I bought the kind of cereal he likes, the one with the marshmallow shapes that I'd never let Kyle have when he was little. I rented two movies from the library because Theo's mom doesn't believe in tablets. I made a list of activities. The Cedar Rapids Public Library has a Saturday story time at 10:30. The science center on First Avenue has a kids' floor. I had three backup ideas for if the weather got bad. I'm 61. I retired from bookkeeping at Knutson Construction 2 years ago after 28 years there. My husband Don passed in 2019 from a stroke. So this house has been quiet for a long time. The thought of having a 6 year old running around in it for 48 hours felt like Christmas. Kyle dropped him off Friday at 5:15. Theo had his Spider Man backpack and a stuffed rabbit named Carrots and a juice box he was already drinking. Kyle said "Mom, his asthma inhaler is in the front pocket, don't forget, just in case." I said "I won't forget, Kyle, go enjoy your wife." Jess hugged me twice. They were on the road by 5:22. Friday night was perfect. We had spaghetti. Theo ate most of his and a slice of garlic bread. We watched a movie about a dog and we both fell asleep on the couch before the end of it. I carried him to the guest room around 9, which I was proud of, because at 61 carrying 47 pounds of sleeping kid up half a flight of stairs is not nothing. Saturday morning was the morning. He woke up at 6:42 and came padding into my room in his dinosaur pajamas and said "Grandma, can we make pancakes." Like he'd been thinking about it since Friday. I said of course we can. I have made pancakes maybe 4,000 times in my life. I started making them for Kyle when he was 3. I made them for my husband every Sunday for 31 years. I have a cast iron pan I bought in 1987 that I have used so many times the bottom is black and slick like glass. I don't measure. I don't need a recipe. I crack the eggs into the bowl with one hand. Pancakes are a thing I can do in my sleep. That morning I could not crack an egg. I want to explain what was happening with my hands so you understand. This wasn't new. This had been creeping up on me for about 3 years. It started in my right hand, the index and middle finger especially, with a stiffness in the morning that took an hour to work out. Then it was both hands. Then it was the base of both thumbs, that little muscle where the thumb meets the wrist, and the joints would just lock up if I held something too long. I'd been to my doctor about it. She'd said "this is normal at your age, Beverly, especially with your bookkeeping history, you've been doing fine motor work with those hands for almost 40 years." She wrote me a prescription for an anti inflammatory. I took it for a while. It bothered my stomach. I stopped. I tried other things. Glucosamine. A topical cream that smelled like menthol. One of those paraffin wax dip things they sell at Bed Bath and Beyond before it closed. None of it really did anything. I'd kind of accepted that this was just what my hands were going to be from here on out. But I'd never had Theo for a whole weekend. I cracked the first egg fine. Beat the batter fine. Poured it onto the pan. The first three pancakes I made were beautiful. Theo was sitting on a kitchen stool in his pajamas watching me with his chin on his hand like a little man and I felt like I was 35 years old. I went to flip the fourth pancake and my right hand seized. It's hard to describe if you haven't had it happen. The pan is in your hand and you know it's heavy, and you know your fingers are supposed to grip it, and they're just not. It's like the wires got cut. The pan tipped. I tried to grab it with my left hand. My left hand was holding the spatula. The pan went sideways. The hot grease and a half cooked pancake came out of the pan and ran down the side, and a stripe of it landed on the back of Theo's wrist, which was resting on the counter about 18 inches away. He screamed. I have never heard a noise like that in my life. Not from Kyle when he was small. Not from anybody. The pan landed on the floor with a sound like a gunshot and bounced under the kitchen table. Theo was off the stool, holding his wrist, screaming, looking at me with eyes that were asking me what just happened. I want to tell you I moved fast. I want to tell you I scooped him up and ran cold water and held him and was a grandmother. What I actually did was stand there with my mouth open for about 4 seconds because my hands were still curled and shaking and I couldn't make them open back up. Then I moved. I got him to the sink. Cold water. I held his little wrist under it. He kept crying but the crying changed, got softer, became the cry that means it hurts but I'm okay. I told him I was so sorry. I told him grandma was so sorry. He said "it's okay, Grandma." He was the one comforting me. The burn was a red stripe about an inch and a half long across the back of his wrist. Not blistered. Not deep. The kind of burn a kid gets and forgets about by Tuesday. I knew, even then, that it was going to be fine. He was going to be fine. But I could not stop shaking. I dried his arm. I put the burn cream from my medicine cabinet on it, the one with the lidocaine. I gave him a juice box and turned on the TV and put cartoons on. He calmed down. Within 10 minutes he was laughing at a cartoon raccoon. I went into the bathroom and I called my son Kyle and I lied. I told him Theo had bumped his wrist on a hot pan but everything was fine and we were all good. I made it sound like Theo had reached for something. I made it sound like an accident a 6 year old caused. I didn't tell him I had dropped a pan of hot oil because my hands gave out. I asked him if he could come back early because I didn't think I was up for two more days. I said I had a migraine. Kyle was quiet on the phone for a beat. Then he said "Mom, are you sure you're okay." I said I was sure. They cut the trip short. They got home at 4:15 that afternoon. Jess hugged Theo for a long time and looked at his little wrist and said "oh sweetheart, I'm sure Grandma felt terrible." Kyle gave me a look I couldn't read and they took him home. I closed the front door and I stood in my kitchen alone and I did not cry because I was past crying. I just sat at my kitchen table for about an hour and looked at my hands and thought about what I had done. Here is the part that ate at me for the next 11 weeks. It wasn't the burn. The burn healed in 6 days. Theo doesn't remember it. He talks about that weekend like it was the best thing ever, the spaghetti and the movie and the marshmallow cereal, and the burn doesn't come up. It was that I had lied to my son. And it was that I did not trust myself to be alone with my grandson. I started turning down babysitting. Kyle would call and say "Mom, can you watch Theo Thursday after school for a couple hours" and I would invent a thing. A doctor's appointment. A church meeting. I have not been to church in a year. I lied to my son so many times in those 11 weeks that I started losing track of which lies I'd told. I stopped cooking for myself. If I couldn't trust my hands to hold a pan around my grandson, I sure didn't trust them when nobody was watching. I started eating cereal for dinner. Or sandwiches. Or those frozen meals you stick in the microwave. My weight went up 7 pounds in 2 months because all I was eating was carbs and salt. I stopped knitting. I'd been making Theo a blanket since November. It sat in my basket by the couch with the needles still stuck in it. I stopped a lot of things. The thing that finally broke it was bunco. I have a bunco group. We've been playing the second Tuesday of every month for 14 years. Eight women. We rotate houses. There's wine. There's a vegetable tray nobody eats. The dice get thrown and the lying gets started. It's the closest thing I have to therapy. It was Eileen's house in April. Eileen Boudreau. I've known Eileen since 1987 when our boys were in T ball together. Her son Marcus is the same age as Kyle. Eileen is 63. She is the kind of woman who tells the truth even when nobody asked her to. I was at Eileen's kitchen counter pouring myself a second glass of wine and trying to open a jar of olives for the appetizer plate. I could not get the lid to turn. I was using both hands. I was leaning my whole body into it. The lid was not moving. Eileen came up behind me and watched for about 4 seconds and then she said "Bev. Honey. How long has that been going on." I said "what." She said "your hands. The trembling. The way you're holding that jar. How long." I started crying right there at her kitchen counter with a jar of olives in my hands. The other six women were in the dining room laughing about something. Eileen took the jar from me, set it down, and walked me into her front sitting room, which is a room nobody ever sits in, and she closed the door. She said "tell me." I told her. All of it. The pan. The burn. The lie to Kyle. The 11 weeks of canceling. The blanket I hadn't finished. The cereal for dinner. Eileen listened. She didn't interrupt. When I was done she sat there for a minute with her hands on her knees. Then she said "Bev. I want to tell you something. And you are going to listen because I am your friend and I love you. I went through some of this 4 years ago. Not exactly the same. But the hands thing. The locking up thing. The being scared of dropping things. I know what that fear looks like because I had it." I said "you never told me." She said "I know I didn't. Because I was embarrassed. Same as you. We are women of a generation that thinks if our body is failing it's our fault for not being tougher. It's not." She got up. Walked into her kitchen. Came back with a small dark green bottle and set it on the coffee table between us. She said "this isn't a miracle. I'm not going to sit here and tell you to start taking a supplement and your problems are over. That's not what this is. But I started taking this almost 3 years ago and the locking up thing got better. Slowly. Over months. And the reason I'm telling you about it tonight, instead of going back to bunco and pretending you didn't just cry on me, is that you're at the part where you stopped trusting yourself. And that part is the worst part. And I want you out of it." I picked up the bottle. Alevia. Amla. I had never heard either word in my life. She said "amla. It's a fruit. From India. They call it the Indian gooseberry. People have been taking it for thousands of years. There's actually research on it. I'm not a sciencey person, you know that, but I read enough of it to feel comfortable trying it. And the reason I tried it specifically for my hands is that the research has a lot to say about cartilage. The thing that wears down at the joints. The thing nobody can really fix once it's worn out, but turns out you can support." I said "support how." She said "your joints are not just bone on bone. There are enzymes that break down the cushion in there over time. There are inflammatory signals that make the joints worse than they have to be. There's oxidative stress, which is just a fancy way of saying the wear and tear at the cellular level." She said "amla has been studied for its effects on those things. The enzymes that chew up cartilage. The inflammatory signals. The cellular stress. It's not a painkiller. It doesn't numb anything. What it does, from what I read, is help create a better internal environment for the joints to function in." I sat there holding her bottle. She said "I'll be honest with you. The first month I took it, I didn't notice anything. The second month, I started noticing I could open jars again. By the third month, I was knitting at night without my hands aching by 9 pm. I'm not telling you it's going to do exactly that for you. I'm telling you I haven't stopped taking it in almost 3 years and I never will." I went home that night and I sat at my kitchen table and I read everything I could find about amla. I am a bookkeeper. I read for a living. I read research papers like other people read magazines. So I went deep. What I learned was this. Amla is the fruit of a tree called Phyllanthus emblica. It's native to India and Southeast Asia. It's one of the most studied botanicals in Ayurvedic medicine, but more importantly, it has been picked up by modern researchers in the last 20 years and put through actual clinical trials. The thing that interested me most, given my situation, was the joint research. There are studies looking at amla's effect on cartilage. Specifically, on enzymes called hyaluronidase and collagenase, which are the enzymes responsible for breaking down the cushion at your joints. Amla contains compounds, hydrolyzable tannins and polyphenols, that have been shown to inhibit those enzymes. Translation, because I had to translate it for myself. The cartilage in your joints is constantly under attack from enzymes that wear it down. Amla appears to slow down those enzymes. Which means the cushion lasts longer. Which means the joints have a better environment to function in. There's also a 12 week clinical study, on humans, where amla supplementation was associated with reductions in pain and stiffness scores in people with joint complaints. I'm not making medical claims. I'm telling you what's published. And there's the inflammation piece. Amla has been associated, repeatedly, with reductions in inflammatory markers in the body. Including the kind of low grade, chronic, background inflammation that is the real culprit behind joint stiffness in people my age. It's not the dramatic kind of inflammation, the swollen ankle kind. It's the slow, steady, every joint at the same time kind. The kind that creeps up on you over years. Which is exactly what had been happening to my hands. I sat at my kitchen table at 11:30 pm with my reading glasses on and I made the decision. I ordered a bottle of Alevia Amla that night. The version Eileen had on her coffee table. Same brand. Same bottle. It came in 4 days. I started on a Wednesday. Two capsules. With breakfast. Same time as my coffee and my morning paper. Like Eileen said, the first month I didn't notice much. Some mornings my hands felt a little less locked when I woke up, but I told myself I was imagining it because I wanted it to be working. Around week 5, something happened that wasn't imagined. I was unloading the dishwasher and I picked up a stack of plates, 4 of them, with one hand, and walked them to the cabinet without thinking. I had not been able to do that in over a year. I had been doing one plate at a time for months because I didn't trust my grip. I stood in my kitchen holding 4 dinner plates in one hand and I just started crying. By week 8, I was knitting again. By week 10, I finished the blanket I'd been making for Theo. By week 12, I called Kyle and asked if I could have Theo for a weekend. He said "Mom, are you sure." I said "I'm sure." That weekend was a month ago. We made pancakes. I cracked the eggs one handed. I flipped them with the same cast iron pan. Theo sat on the same stool. Nothing went wrong. Everything just worked. After he ate, I sat down across from him at the table. I told him I needed to tell him something. I said "Theo, do you remember when I burned your wrist." He said "yeah, but it doesn't hurt anymore." I said "I lied to your dad about how it happened. Grandma's hands weren't working that day. The pan slipped because I couldn't hold it. I want you to know that. I want you to know I'm sorry. And I want you to know that grandma is doing better now." He looked at me. He's 6. He doesn't have the words for what I was telling him. He said "okay, Grandma. Are we going to the library today." I laughed. I told him yes. That afternoon when Kyle came to pick him up, I told Kyle the truth too. Standing in my driveway in May with the lilacs blooming. The whole story. The pan. The lie. The 11 weeks of canceling. Bunco. Eileen. The bottle. The 12 weeks. All of it. He hugged me for a long time. He's a grown man. He hugged me like he was 8. I am writing this for the women out there who lied to their kids the way I lied to mine. The grandmothers who started canceling. The women who put down their knitting needles and never picked them back up. The women whose hands stopped doing what they used to do, and who told themselves the lie that this was just what 60 was. It doesn't have to be. I am not telling you Alevia Amla is going to do for you what it did for me. I don't know your body. I don't know your joints. I'm just a 61 year old retired bookkeeper from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who learned about a fruit from a friend at bunco and decided to try it. But if you've got a grandchild you've stopped picking up, or a jar you can't open, or a pan you don't trust yourself with, I'd say it's worth a look. The bottle is called Alevia Amla. It's made here in the United States. The capsules are easy to swallow. One bottle is a month's supply. And the company has a 90 day money back guarantee, which Eileen made me look up before I ordered, because she's careful that way. You take it for 90 days. If you don't feel a difference, you send the bottle back, even if it's empty, and they refund you. No fight. No fine print. So there's nothing to lose. You can find it here. P.S. The blanket I made Theo is purple and grey because those are his favorite colors. He sleeps with it every night. Jess sent me a picture last week. He had it pulled up to his chin and Carrots the rabbit was tucked under it. I keep that picture on my fridge. I look at it every morning when I take my two capsules with my coffee. P.P.S. About the guarantee. I will tell you what Eileen told me. A company that lets you send back an empty bottle and get your money back is a company that knows what's in the bottle. That's the part that mattered to me. 90 days is a long enough time for a body my age to actually feel a difference. If you're going to try anything, give it the full 90 before you decide. P.P.P.S. If you are a grandmother who has been canceling on her grandkids because she doesn't trust her own hands, please. Please. Don't spend another 11 weeks the way I spent mine. Read the research yourself. Talk to your doctor if you need to. But don't sit at your kitchen table eating cereal for dinner because you're scared of yourself. There's another way to live in this body. I found it. You can too. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33